The last couple months I’ve been on a deep dive working through the major lectures and works of Martin Heidegger.
Heidegger’s thinking takes everything I ever learned from systems thinking, which was the foundation of my book Squat Every Day, and pushes it far beyond any scientific theory.
This is no time for a lecture on German phenomenology, but there is a big idea that I want to riff on:
Our society’s obsession with theories and measurements separates us from the actual reality of living a life in the right-here and right-now.
You are not a disembodied thought-blob that looks out on a foreign world of strange objects.
Before you and I ever think or experience anything, we’re already living with bodies, in our environment, alongside other people.
We didn’t choose the world we were born into. We just showed up and dealt with what we were given.
The Science™ (PBUH) can’t tell us a blessed thing about the actual living of a life because science is the business of carving up existence into distinct objects.
All our theories and all our knowledge begin from the fact that somebody is here to think it and know it.
Here’s another metaphor that might help:
Look at something in front of you. A coffee cup, a tennis ball, a desk, a tree, whatever.
Now imagine a dead animal’s eye on a dissection tray in a biology lab.
Eyes are the topic in both examples. What’s the difference?
In the first case, you look at a thing. That’s an action that you do.
In the second case, the dead eye can’t look at anything. It’s an object for being looked at.
Being a human being is acting, and acting cannot be any kind of object.
Theories deal in objects, not acts.
If you only live in theory, you separate yourself from the living activity that is existence before any theories enter the scene.
Confused yet?
That’s a decent-enough dose of Heidegger for you to meditate on.
What’s the point of this detour into obscure philosophy?
I got to thinking about how learning happens and where we get stuck.
I’m practicing to do handstands. I can hurl myself into the upright position easily enough, as long as there’s a wall to support me after I kick up. I’ve got the strength to hold the position at the top for at least 15 seconds. I can even do a push-up or three once I’m there.
What’s giving me the devil is the transition from the kick-up to the free-standing hold. That’s the last piece of the puzzle that will unlock the whole thing.
I struggled with that for awhile before I realized I could do a Google search, where I found a couple of drills that work exactly this step.
The light went on at that point.
The magic is in the mental “click” that happens when you go from stuck to seeing the light on the other end of the tunnel.
You can’t do anything if you can’t feel that there’s a way to the end.
I don’t mean visualizing yourself having already done the thing.
This is different. It’s a feeling, even an intuition, where you just know with total confidence that there’s a path from here to there.
Feeling stuck is a response to not seeing the next step.
When you know what to do next, there is no more stuck.
Blocks are a kind of ignorance, but not an ignorance of facts so much as ignorance of “I can”.
When “I can’t” shifts into “I can do this”, that’s when the ice breaks and movement happens.
What are you stuck with right now? Email subscribers can write and let me know. I might be able to help you unfreeze.
Use the link:
Matt Perryman